


Watermark

by strangestquiet



Category: Persona 4
Genre: Bromance, Drowning, Ice Skating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-15
Updated: 2011-09-15
Packaged: 2017-10-23 18:24:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangestquiet/pseuds/strangestquiet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Souji develops a fear of ice skating after a near-death experience.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watermark

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this request](http://badbadbathhouse.livejournal.com/1655.html?thread=9156471#t9156471) at badbadbathhouse, asking for some context for [this unusually adorable picture](http://i45.tinypic.com/2vrtx0h.jpg). I... like to wait months and months before adding stuff to this site I guess...? :o

**February, 2014**

  
“Y’know… Souji, you don’t have to—“

“I know,” he says, speaking with perfect calm even as his grip on the sideboards tightens by reflex. “It’s fine. Just give me a sec.”

The look on Yosuke’s face is sympathetic, almost painful to look at, but he gives him space as requested. This is so stupid, Souji thinks. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s an _ice rink_ , for crying out loud; there’s nothing but wood below the shallow, frozen surface, and he knows it. Turn it all to water and it still wouldn’t reach his shins. Practically a puddle, in comparison…

 _(People can still drown in puddles.)_

He breathes deep and exhales slowly through his mouth, and beyond the vapour cloud of his breath he watches Yosuke skate around in loose circles a few metres away, waiting for him. He looks utterly at ease, like this: hands tucked into his coat pockets, eyes downturned, half-smiling, and Souji finds the tension in his chest slowly unwinding as he watches him. Yosuke has never, ever been anything approaching graceful in his entire life, but somehow he makes this look like it’s the easiest thing in the world, like it’s nothing at all, and maybe – maybe it _isn’t_. Maybe he _is_ being stupid. Maybe—

Yosuke’s skate hits a rut in the ice and he lurches forward, and Souji’s stomach makes exactly the same motion inside of him. Yosuke stumbles, arms suddenly out and flailing, but at the last second he catches himself before he can completely wipe out, and he turns to Souji with a huge, sheepish grin on his face.

But Souji’s gone, off the ice and hobbling away awkwardly on his skates through the wooden bleachers. Thankfully, he manages not to throw up until he makes it all the way outside.

 

 

 **February, 2013**

  
“Y’know… Souji, you don’t have to—“

“I know,” he says, quietly, and much less certain of it than he would be a year later. He stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Yosuke at the edge of the frozen river, watching Nanako chase Kanji around with a mitten full of snow she’s scraped up off the ice, while the rest of their friends howl with laughter. He shifts his weight awkwardly in the snow – still wearing his winter boots. His skates are packed up in the bag at their feet, and despite his repeated insistence that he was absolutely ready to come out today, he allows several long minutes to pass without making any move to put them on. He doesn’t think he can even bend over to get them, not with his stomach feeling like it does, like it’s –

 _(full to overflowing with icy water, until it’s leaking out of his mouth and nose and)_

\--twisting and tangling on itself. He’s afraid to move much at all, for fear of getting sick. Stupid. Why didn’t he just stay home today? No one would have blamed him.

“Ehh, I didn’t really feel like going out there anyway,” Yosuke lies, stretching his arms high over his head and giving Souji a grin and a wink. “Let them freeze their asses off if they want.”

Souji smiles back, and hopes his relief doesn’t shine through as clearly as he feels it does.

They wipe the snow off a broken tree trunk that blew here in the recent storm and sit down, facing the river and their friends together. Shoulder-to-shoulder. Closer than Yosuke used to sit to him, he thinks, but maybe that’s an accident. Yosuke’s gloved hand rests next to his, when he looks – he could move his fingers over just an inch, if he really wanted to. If he really needed to. No one would blame him…

 

 

 **February 2012**

  
The only warning any of them get is a dull, thunderous cracking sound, a deep and ominous groan from below their feet that makes them all stop dead in their tracks. Souji’s never been skating on an actual river before: is it worse to stand still, to lie down and distribute his weight, or to make a sudden movement for the banks? He doesn’t know – and he makes the mistake of trying to ask, of hesitating those few precious seconds that it takes for the ice to fracture under him.

He doesn’t fall through into the river, exactly. He stumbles to his hands and knees when the ice first cracks, and when the water rushes up toward him through the fissure as it yawns open, the treacherous surface just slips away beneath him and he’s dragged under. He hears half a dozen voices cry out somewhere closer to the banks before his head is submerged and the sound is muffled by a deafening rush of water, and –

Cold cold _cold_ \--

The icy shock of submersion almost makes him black out. His brain, his chest, his lungs, they all just _freeze_ , and it’s probably the only thing that saves him when his first instinct is to gasp. The exposed skin on his face stings and, oddly, _burns_ , a hundred thousand pinpricks of pain flaring to life all at once. He flails his arms and finds them impossibly heavy _(waterlogged, everything – his coat, his pants, his entire body, dead weight, dragging him down, down, down—)_ and he slaps the surface of the water before he manages to catch the edge of the ice where he slipped. But he can’t pull himself up. The water is so cold that his fingers are already numbing, and the Samegawa’s current is still strong, beneath the frozen surface; he’s already lost the strength in his hands, and he can’t hold on any longer. He thrashes, close to panic when he tries to lift his head from the water and bumps up against a ceiling of solid ice instead, and the very first clear thought that occurs to him is that he knows he’s going to drown.

The next time his arm is above water, hands grab him by the sleeve of his coat and pull hard, hard enough to allow him to come up for air. He’s not fully aware of it, but he’s hyperventilating, sputtering for breath in huge, greedy, gulping gasps as his body tries to warm up and protect itself. It’s Naoto – the lightest of all of them – and she’s got him by the arm, stretched out flat on her stomach on the ice. She’s shouting at him, he can _hear_ her, but the words don’t make sense, not with his ears plugged and ringing like they are. Someone else is making their careful way toward them, but all he can focus on is the rush of blood pounding in his head and how weird it is that the air he’s swallowing feels even colder than the water and Naoto yelling at him to stay above the surface. But Souji can’t do anything to help her; she pulls and pulls, and eventually pulls so hard his soaking sleeve slips out of her hands entirely and he goes back under without warning.

Painfully freezing water floods his mouth and nose and throat and for a horrifying, wide-eyed moment he’s _breathing_ it, and if he doesn’t exhale it’s going to get down into his lungs, and if he does exhale he won’t ever take another breath again –

Someone gets a solid grip on his forearm and hauls him up and out of the water, far enough so his upper body rests on the edge where he fell. Before he can slip back in, the hands are grabbing by the collar of his coat and the waistband of his pants and pulling him further up—

“Gotcha. I’ve got him!”

“Quick, someone call Dojima-san—“

“Yosuke-senpai, hurry!"

\--and then he’s out, sprawled wet on the ice, coughing up water and trembling violently with Yosuke still pulling him along; the only one strong enough to lift him, but light enough not to fall in himself. There’s no time to rest or recover. Naoto helps drag him further once they’ve escaped the most dangerous area, and from there he’s brought back safely to the river’s edge, stripped of his dripping jacket and sweater and wrapped in someone else’s (not sure whose at first, but fur trim tickles his cheek and it smells faintly of orange _something_ ). The others huddle around him, to keep him warm; he wants to tell them it isn’t necessary, but he can’t give form to the sounds that escape through his numb lips and chattering teeth.

So he lies back in someone’s arms, in _many_ someones’ arms, and stares up at the dead tree branches and telephone wires outlined against the pale sky, and thinks that the second worst feeling in the world after drowning is being helpless.

 

 

 **February 2013**

  
Yosuke makes the decision for him, after they sit on the tree trunk in silence for long enough and Souji finds it harder and harder to stay upright. His hand creeps across that tiny space between them and covers Souji’s fingers with his own, and it’s both so expected and _un_ expected that Souji’s not sure if it helps or worsens his nausea. But in another second, it doesn’t matter – Yosuke second guesses himself, and tries to cover up what he’s done by patting Souji’s hand lightly instead of letting their fingers intertwine, and then he pulls away, clearing his throat awkwardly.

“It’s been a lot colder this winter,” he says, and it’s halfway to being the lamest topic changer in the history of ever before Souji realizes where he’s going with it. “Dad says the river’s frozen pretty solid this year. You don’t need to worry so much.”

Souji’s chest tightens in reflexive panic. Is Yosuke going to force him to face this after all? Appropriate, he thinks, after all they’ve been through together, after all the things Souji’s forced _him_ to face. Appropriate – but not welcome. Not yet. “Yosuke, I don’t – think I can –“

“I meant about them,” said Yosuke, raising his chin a little toward their friends. “I know you’re worried, but… there’s no need to torture yourself. You don’t need to sit here and stand guard, y’know?”

“…Oh,” he says, guiltily. Caught. “Yeah, I – I guess so.”

Yosuke gets to his feet, quickly brushing snow off his ass and the hem of his coat. He grins at him, and offers his hand to help him up. “Well? C’mon, then. Let’s find somewhere else to be.”

He accepts the help. They clasp each other by the forearms as Yosuke hauls him to his feet, and then the grip loosens and slides to their wrists, and then to their hands. For a moment, it’s a steady, anchoring grip, a link to solid ground when the world feels like it’s spinning out of control all around him, just like it was back then. Just like it’s always been.

Souji holds on just a second longer than he strictly needs to.

 

 

 **February, 2014**

  
Yosuke doesn’t follow Souji outside, but Souji knows he will, if he takes too long, so he forces himself to go back in after just a few minutes. When he returns, Yosuke is still on the ice, leaning on the sideboards with his back to Souji as he approaches. Souji leans on them from the other side, and mumbles an apology.

“S’cool,” he assures him, without turning around. “One step at a time, right, partner?”

“Yeah. I…” Souji sighs then, a sharp, angry exhalation of breath that puffs past the side of Yosuke’s face in a cloud. “I’m sorry. You’re just trying to help, and… I’m being really stupid about this.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Souji—“ Yosuke turns to face him, abruptly. He leans on the boards again, slightly to Souji’s left, and their arms and their heads are very close together as he leans in and lowers his voice. “I want to tell you something.”

Souji’s stomach lurches again, for an entirely different reason, and suddenly his face doesn’t feel quite so cold anymore.

But what Yosuke wants to tell him isn’t what he suspects – _fears; hopes?_ – it to be. “You weren’t around for it, so you wouldn’t have known it happened,” Yosuke begins. “But… back then – after we finally beat that rotting corpse of a goddess? I couldn’t go anywhere near water at all.”

Souji frowns. “Why not?”

“Seaweed,” he explains. When Souji’s confused expression only deepens, Yosuke tries to clarify. “The first time I went swimming that summer, I got a bunch of seaweed tangled around my legs. I wasn’t in deep or anything, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t break free, but – it felt so much like what that _thing_ did to us, y’know? Felt like it was those weird-ass _hands_ all over again – felt like I was going to go under and… and never come up. Scared the hell out of me… just like it did that first time.”

Souji isn’t sure what to say. None of them, least of all Yosuke, has ever spoken a word to him about Izanami’s curse. He doesn’t blame them. They never talked about any of their near-misses in the other world, for that matter. He doesn’t like talking about his newer brush with death either. “Why haven’t you ever told me any of this?”

“I dunno… I guess I didn’t want you to think I was weak.” It’s not particularly funny, but Yosuke laughs lightly anyway. Nervously. “Or something stupid like that, who knows. Anyway, I skipped every damn beach day for the entire summer because I was too damn scared to go near the water. Just spent them all in my room instead. It sucked.”

“So what changed?”

Yosuke smiles at him. “…Nothing,” he says quietly. “I’m still terrified.”

Souji’s mouth opens, a little, but he can’t find the words.

“But that’s life, y’know? I can’t keep skirting around it forever.” Yosuke takes Souji’s hand in his, and leads him over to the opening in the sideboards. “Even if it’s just a little bit at a time, that’s okay. I’ll have to learn how to work up to it, I guess.”

“But – you and Naoto –“ Somewhat distracted, Souji allows Yosuke to take him onto the ice, although his free hand remains fasted securely to the boards to keep him from wobbling on unsteady legs. “Yosuke, you could have fallen in with me!”

Yosuke stops tugging on his hand for a second, and gives him a look that falls halfway between _I thought you were supposed to be smart_ and _don’t move, there is a large spider on your head_. “You moron. Do you really think _that’s_ what I was thinking about? Uh, no. I was thinking something like, _my best friend is going to die if I don’t get my ass in gear…_ Except at the time it sounded more like _shitshitshitshitshit_ in my head, I guess. You get the idea.”

Souji drops his gaze. Closes his eyes. Squeezes one hand around the sideboard, and the other around Yosuke’s, like he can draw even the tiniest shred of his strength through that small physical link. Now, like it did on the riverbanks, like it did in the freezing river, like he hopes it will do for a long time to come, it anchors him.

“Okay,” says Souji. “…Okay.”

One hand hangs on for dear life. The other lets go.


End file.
